Sir Martin Narey says he would: “My
test in visiting places of custody for over thirty years is to reflect about
how I’d feel if my son or daughter were incarcerated there. In Rainsbrook’s
case, I would consider him or her to be safe and to be generally well treated,”
he writes, in a report that is being promoted as “independent” by the Youth
Justice Board.

Rainsbrook secure training centre, in
Northamptonshire, holds boys and girls aged 12 to 18. It is run for the government
by the international security company G4S. The children’s charity Barnardo’s is
contracted to provide the children with independent advocacy.

Narey started his prison governor
training in 1982 and was director-general of the prison service between 1998
and 2003. He was chief executive of Barnardo’s until 2011, after which he became
the government’s ‘adoption tsar’ and now advises ministers on the education and
training of children’s social workers. He has “offered occasional advice to
G4S” on the care and custody of children since 2012.

“Completely unacceptable”

In May, a joint report from Ofsted, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons and the Care
Quality Commission judged G4S-run Rainsbrook secure training centre to be
inadequate in keeping children safe. “Inadequate” is the lowest possible
rating.

There were 77 children detained at
the time of the inspection. Details of 54 of the children show 17 per cent were
disabled, 57 per cent had been in local authority care and a quarter were aged
15 or under.

The inspectors found that, since their last visit, there
had been “serious incidents of gross misconduct by staff, including some who
were in positions of leadership”.

“Poor staff behaviour has led to some young
people being subject to degrading treatment, racist comments, and being cared
for by staff who were under the influence of illegal drugs,” the inspectors
said. Staff collusion with children, and other misconduct, had caused children
“distress and humiliation”.

In two of the eight incidents of
“serious staff misconduct” examined by inspectors, there was a delay in G4S action
to protect children and, by the time of the inspection, there had been no
review to analyse why such incidents had occurred and to explain the absence of
whistleblowing.

Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre (from G4S promotional video)

G4S issued a press release on the day the report was published, in which director of children’s
services Paul Cook described the report as “extremely disappointing” whilst admitting that the misconduct was “completely
unacceptable”. In the weeks that followed, many local authority youth offending teams refused to have their children held in Rainsbrook.

“I do not believe that”

Last week, on Tuesday 28 July, the
Youth Justice Board (YJB) announced on its website: “An independent report on Rainsbrook
Secure Training Centre (STC) by Sir Martin Narey has been published today”.
Narey “clearly states that, in his view, Rainsbrook is a safe place for
children and young people, they are treated kindly and, with many of them,
tangible progress is made towards their rehabilitation”, its press release
explained. It continues:

“The
YJB continues to work closely with G4S to ensure that the improvements
recommended by the inspectorates are acted upon. We hope that an early
re-inspection of Rainsbrook will be possible and will also confirm progress
made.”

At the same time, G4S announced: “A new assessmentof performance at the Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre for young
offenders has found that the centre is not an unsafe place for children.”

But the ‘news’ was not only that
Rainsbrook had been given the all-clear by Narey, two months after the dreadful inspection report; it
was also that, in
Narey’s opinion, the prison had been safe when the inspectors said it wasn’t.

The G4S press release quoted from Narey’s report: “The
inspectorate conclusion was that in February of this year, at the time of the
inspection, Rainsbrook was an inadequate institution and an unsafe place for
children. I do not believe that.”

Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre (not from G4S promotional video)

Narey reports that the inadequate rating has had a “profound” effect on Rainsbrook’s staff, and that “Understandably, the publicity seems adversely to have affected recruitment .. (a Google search for Rainsbrook produces extremely negative results).” He observed a recruitment day when only two of eight shortlisted candidates (“including some employed from the Prison Service”) turned up.

Local authorities refusing to have their children placed at the centre was “not unreasonable”, Narey says, given “the extensive news coverage.” (The inspectors’ damning findings had been reported by the BBC, ITV, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent and openDemocracy.)

“Free, unfettered access”

The G4S press release states: “During his three-day visit to Rainsbrook. . . Sir Martin was both unsupervised and unaccompanied. He was not constrained by terms of reference and had free and unfettered access to the centre, the staff and the children.”

Narey’s report indicates that he looked through the file of at least one child formerly detained in the prison, watched CCTV footage of children being restrained and was briefed about the crimes that brought individual children to the centre (he reports the serious crimes of seven children).

According to statutory rules: “No outside person shall be permitted to view a centre unless
authorised by statute or the Secretary of State.” And: “No person viewing a
centre shall be permitted to take a photograph, make a sketch or communicate
with a trainee unless authorised by statute or the Secretary of State.”

Was Narey’s visit authorised?

When I asked G4S about this, they
passed me to Narey who explained: “before I visited Rainsbrook, I told the
Secretary of State personally that I had been commissioned to review the care
of children at Rainsbrook and — although G4S were paying for my time — that I
was directing my report primarily to the YJB [Youth Justice Board]. He asked me
simultaneously to let his office have a copy of my report.”

G4S told me the Ministry of Justice
was “aware and content” with Narey’s viewing of the centre, though I’m still no
wiser as to whether the security company sought authorisation.

Independent from whom?

Although Narey’s report states that he
has acted as a paid consultant to G4S since 2012, and the multinational was
upfront in its press release about ‘compensating’ him for this latest piece of
work, there was no disclosure about his role in advising G4S’s bid for the next
seven-year Rainsbrook contract, worth £92 million.

When I asked him about that, Narey
told me: “I worked for seven days for G4S last year advising them on the
educational and child friendly aspects of their bid to retain the management of
their STCs.” (Medway secure training centre is also out to tender, that
contract is worth £89 million). Narey said he has “no role and no knowledge of
the commercial aspects of their bid”.

He wasn’t sure whether he is named in
the bid or the appendices, adding that he had “made an offer to bring together
a group of critically minded people to act as some sort of ethics committee
overseeing the care of our most vulnerable incarcerated children” whoever might
run the centres in future.

When I pressed G4S on the matter, I
was told that if Narey “was mentioned [in the bid] it would only have been in
relation to his offer to set up an ethics committee”.

Private Eye 14-27 May 2010 (issue 1262)

Then there is the matter of rigour.

Narey describes his methodology in
his report. He says he “drew keys and wandered through the centre at will”. And:
“At my insistence I worked without terms of reference.” He spoke with children
informally, not in “focus groups or in any other similarly contrived session”.

The three inspectorates issued a joint
statement in response to Narey’s published
assessment. They said that their own inspection was “deep and broad, as the public would expect”.

They explained: “Our
inspectors drew keys, walked unaccompanied throughout the centre and conducted
many one-to-one interviews with young people. We ate with them, visited their
living units and observed their education. Together we spent a total of 70
inspector days at Rainsbrook. The judgements were firmly based on a wide range
of evidence and rightly took account of what had happened in the months leading
up to the inspection.”

Children in custody are routinely
surveyed during inspections, to establish their views and experiences from
admission to preparation for discharge. One question relates to visits from
family and friends. Inspectors reported in May that just 36 per cent of
children at Rainsbrook received a weekly visit – significantly lower than the
52 per cent average across all secure training centres. On this matter, Narey recounts
discussions with “one or two” girls who said their families found it difficult
to visit, because of the prohibitive distance between home and prison. “I don’t
believe that to be the case,” he concludes, citing the efforts staff made to
persuade the parents of one girl to visit.

Narey rejects the inspectorates’
judgement that a senior manager had prevented a child with a fractured wrist
receiving medical treatment. Revealing that the senior manager in question was,
in fact, the director of the centre, Narey observes:

“I
interviewed the ex-Director specifically on this point. It is impossible to be
certain what happened. So I find Ofsted’s certainty about his personal
culpability — reflected in a decision last week to ask G4S to refer him to the
Health and Care Professions Council — puzzling. On balance I consider that it
is extremely unlikely that he would intentionally ignore clear medical advice
and refuse to send a child to hospital, not least because to do so would have
opened him up to potential dismissal and the end of his social work career.”

As someone who has made hundreds of
freedom of information requests over the years, with many refusals on the basis
of protecting personal data, I have to say that many of Narey’s disclosures are
striking.

Narey questions the dismissal of an
“apparently popular” member of staff for piggy-backing on a child. “That member
of staff might have considered his dismissal to be harsh,” he concludes,
without giving a professional view as to whether G4S had followed employment
law.

He asserts: “For the last three
years, and after every occasion that a child is restrained, he or she is
interviewed by someone from Barnardo’s.” That claim contradicts inspection
reports, and the advocacy service’s own annual reports for the past three years
– which I obtained through an FOI request. The 2012/13 annual report states “no
young person asked for an advocate to be present at their [restraint] debrief”
and the 2013/14 report notes “young people requesting advocate support at their
de-briefs is extremely low”. Such poor take-up “is worthy of further
investigation by the centre”, the inspectorates concluded in May 2015.

Narey says he understands why “some of the incidents in 2014” had affected the
inspectorates’ assessment of Rainsbrook. He shares “Ofsted’s horror” about one
abusive event in particular. Despite this, he maintains that the inspection
team was mistaken in its judgement: “The institution may be a better
establishment now than at the time of the inspection. But I doubt that any such
improvement has been significant enough to explain the discrepancy between the
Inspectorates’ conclusion and mine.”

“Utterly devastating”

Four days ahead of Narey’s report,
G4S uploaded a promotional video about Rainsbrook onto YouTube.

Rainsbrook director John Parker,
speaking on the video, calls the inspection findings “utterly devastating”,
adding “clearly over the past 16 years the centre has worked tirelessly to achieve
the highest outcomes for young people”.

Our team at Rainsbrook talks about work to train, teach and rehabilitate some of the UK’s most troubled young people http://t.co/pDtIyBoGzK

No detail is given of the “serious
incidents of gross misconduct by staff” reported by the three inspectorates in
May, or the 37 separate actions G4S had to take in response to the inspection. Neither is there any reference
to the 2012 High Court finding that the three secure training centres operated by G4S, and the one
run by Serco (closed at the end of last year), had been running unlawful
restraint regimes from the time they opened for nearly a decade,
possibly longer.

When the case reached the Court of Appeal in 2013, the systematic physical abuse was challenged by neither government, G4S
nor Serco.

Gareth MyattRainsbrook’s 16-year history includes
the horrific death of Gareth
Myatt, aged 15, of mixed race, and small
for his age. He was admitted on a Friday and died of asphyxiation whilst being
restrained by three G4S officers the following Monday. At the inquest into Gareth’s
death John Parker, who was Rainsbrook’s director at the time, admitted that he
had never read
the Home Office manual governing the
use of restraint in his prison.

Ofsted has a complaints procedure
that G4S might have used to challenge the inspection process or conclusions. I
asked G4S if they had done so. The answer I got was: “We made representations
around the report.” There is no mention in Narey’s report of the multinational using
official channels to dispute what the inspectors found.

Author note: This piece is written in a personal capacity.

About the author

Carolyne Willow, a former child protection social worker and longstanding children’s rights campaigner, is Director of a new charity, Article 39, which fights for the rights of children living in institutional settings. Her book, Children Behind Bars, is published by Policy Press. Carolyne tweets @article_39

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